‘Design-Society’ Cycle: A Case Study on the Story of Longitude - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 115

or group. For instance, a requirement for providing 'education for all' might be to
develop affordable teaching aids for schools in villages in India.
Expectations are aspects of the world around an individual to which the
individual has been accustomed, and the aspects which she wants at least to be
retained. Expectations can become requirements if these are unlikely to be fulfilled
given the knowledge of reality, e.g. expectations may be to retain the current level
of GHG emissions, but given the knowledge of reality where fossil fuel consump-
tion is on rapid increase, this is unlikely to be fulfilled, and may have to be
addressed as a requirement.
Aspirations are what an individual wishes the world around her to become. This
is typically beyond expectations, where expectations often provide the benchmark
against which the intended change will be assessed. A change can be between two
different experiences of the same individual, one experience and another from
knowledge, one borrowed from the aspirations of valued others, a change between
one's experience and that from a social norm, a borrowed social motive, and so
on. For instance, one may be used to garbage being handled in an unsafe manner by
people from low income groups (own experience), and aspire the situation to
change where garbage will be handled in a safe manner by people who would be
well paid for the job (e.g. from knowledge of other contexts), etc.
Identity of an individual is a label signifying a group to which the individual
perceives herself to belong, or to whom others perceive the individual to belong.
For instance, an individual may be perceived to be an Indian by nationality, a Hindu
by birth, a male by gender, an engineer and a PhD by education, a professor by
profession, a husband, a father or a member of a specific family, a Bengali
by mother tongue, etc. Each identity provides a rich tapestry of experiences, and
a variety of people with whom the individual has the chance to share or juxtapose
her experiences and their values.
9.3 How Are Aspirations and Expectations Created?
Chakrabarti ( 2013 ) proposed five major factors that influence an individual's
experience (i.e. action and learning), leading to their subsequent modification:
attitude and interest, resources, incentives, knowledge, and remunerations. These
are influenced by environment via incentives (goals, promise for remunerations)
and resources (physical resources and external knowledge) in the beginning, and
external remunerations at the end of the action and associated learning event. The
question we ask now is: what is responsible for the construction of expectations and
aspirations? Expectations, we propose, are influenced by (Fig. 9.1 ):
• Experience of the individual, which is part of the knowledge formed as the
individual undergoes the actions and learning in her various identities, and how
these are valued by the individual;